Chapter 8
"- horrible. I can't even look at him," Yuki growled, furiously clawing his fingers into the packed dirt around a bunch of Chinese cabbages, sitting placidly with open leaves to take in the boy's voice. "He makes me so angry. He makes me... lose control of my actions. I hate it. I hate him.
Yuki curled his hand into a fist of dirt and root. His eyes darkened as he cast them down.
"I hate... this curse. I hate this family, I hate being the rat, I hate how everyone treats me and how I don't have the guts, the damn guts to do a thing about it. For all my life I was afraid of Akito. Now - now I'm just sorry for him. I pity him. He hates himself... Just like me. But he can do whatever he wants. He's god. Me, I'm the one who carries just as much of the curse as he does. I can't do anything. I can't do anything but hate. And that's why I don't want to hate, why I find myself not hating everything... that I have to hate. And hating what I ought to love. I can't be happy, no matter what.
"I hate it," Yuki whispered, releasing the dirt and lowering his head to the earth. He closed his eyes and his purple hair twisted across the ground. "I hate me."
The breeze ruffled his white sleeves, a gentle reassurance of harnessed power in the midst of early fall.
"...You don't know how to hate," Yuki murmured, opening his eyes to the plot of plants. "You don't judge. You just love and grow. Why can't everything be so simple? Why can't I just nurture things in my life and know that it will mean something?"
The plants tilted their stems towards the voice of their prince as he recited his mournful soliloquy. The afternoon sun was lost in the clouds overhead, neither dark nor bright, but an awful and endless grey.
Yuki lifted his head, and turned his cheek into the clumping dirt.
"You know," he whispered, to the plants who would always listen even if they never understood, "He... smelled me today. When I came out of my room, he attacked me and lost his mind. He licked me and purred and acted like a cat - like a cat completely enthralled with something fantastic. But it wasn't him, it wasn't something normal or explicable. He was delirious, from being sick."
Yuki furrowed his brows. "Of course, it could've been from you. When he was sick before, he never acted this way. It had to have been you who did this. To mock me. To make me feel more miserable than I already was. To make me feel hopeless; to blind me with that truth... and to lose control again," he lowered his voice to a whisper, "Is that it? Is this some ploy to make me lose control?
"... I used to never speak, for a long time, because it was easier. Now I speak but I don't say anything. What's the good in that? It's not me. And the only time when I am myself, it is... hurtful. I put out a part of myself and it's rejected."
The prince turned to face his subjects, who cowed beneath his angry eyes. "You. I put my heart into you, and now, that stupid cat - will hate me. He'll have a reason to hate me, unlike before. The only person who could ever understand me was scared away... because he understood me. Because I put my heart into you, and you betrayed me by seducing him against his will."
Yuki turned away.
"So... I'm not going to let you have my heart anymore..."
He stood up with pale lips twisted into a despairing frown.
"No one. Nothing. Ever again."
Tohru said that Kyou had reappeared some time in the early evening and promptly went into his room. This was all speculative since Tohru generally was too ditzy to know what was going on right before her face, but as it was the only information that Yuki overheard, it was all he knew. Kyou'd been training outside, apparently. Shigure shrugged it off, outwardly; Tohru smiled brightly; Yuki didn't respond; and no one in the house actually believed the cat. Yuki didn't care to call him on the bluff, however. Yuki didn't want to see him at all, because as far as he was concerned, he had better things to do with his time than to fight over whatever that stupid cat did, or didn't, say.
Dinner came in a predictable fashion for Sunday evenings, fitting the formula of fish and fried rice. The particular dinner that Tohru had made was miso salmon, which generally pleased everyone -- even Kyou who loathed miso. He didn't say anything about it, and returned upstairs to eat Honda-san's meal in his own peace. Which was a shame on his part: Again, the setting was lovingly arranged with bursts of color and spices and textures and types of food. Shigure babbled over her display endlessly, and nearly caused Tohru to faint from too much blood rushing to her head. Yuki had nothing to add.
Everything tasted bland. The rice, the salmon, the green tea, it all tasted the same. Like nothing; simple grits in his mouth. Yuki forced it down for the sake of etiquette, but didn't bother to clean his plate as he usually did.
He just stood up and walked out of the room without saying a word. No 'thank you, Honda-san', or, 'The meal was delicious', or even a slightly angry, 'I'm going to my room'. He said nothing.
Just like the way he felt.
Thanks for the reviews, guys! Umm, I think Yuki is feeling too guilty for manipulating Kyou. But that's a good idea.